This watch Holland Score! Nine Girls in a Game! There's this house in this neighborhood in New Jersey that actually isn't a house. It's hard to see because it's behind this gate, but if you look at it from above, you'll see that it's actually a really large building. Oh damn, it's like a warehouse. It has dozens of air conditioning units and it's just sitting here among a sea of ordinary suburban homes.

All of this is just a facade hiding this massive building that is a landing station for a T, the place where these massive undersea cables that connect to the world. Hit The Eastern Seaboard But why are they hiding it? We now know for certain that the US government spies on those cables. With the help, this video is called Uma Submarine Cables and the Rise of Mass Surveillance. It's by John Harris makes analytical videos about certain phenomenons that happen around the world and like that, and we're watching it right now.

It's crazy. They process all the data that they collect somewhere in New Jersey in a facility called Pine Cone. Lining up these Maps points to this secretive disguised building as one of the best candidates for where this surveillance is being processed, right? But there's a lot more of these hidden buildings around the country. Thanks to leaked NSA documents and some thorough investigative reporting, we now know some of their locations like the fake house in New Jersey These other cable spy facilities have nine non-descript buildings avoiding any undue attention along the streets of New York or San Francisco or Dallas these few hundred cables that connect our world contain an unfathomable amount of data, all of our communication, all of our connections, and it would seem impossible that any government agency would be able to spy on it all.

Impossible. that is if we didn't have solid proof that they do, Huh? So let me tell you the story of the cables that connect our planet and show you that if you can tap into them, you can watch the world. And they have. And they've been doing it for a long time.

20 million records every day. What if some guy pulls up into submarine and goes to scuba and to go to the wire and they put a tap on it they they cable tapping about. here is a total revolution of the whole concept of force. Exploit it all.

Now is the moment where I say thank you to the sponsor of today's video I'm very grateful for sponsors I wouldn't be able to do this job and make independent journalism if we didn't and then to see all of the lists that you're on and they address and your phone number off the for these benefit from Cognito and try it out for 30 days. What's it called? It's Incognito.com Johnny Harris and you can go over Japan and try it out for We laid the first copper cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858. it connected Ireland to Canada. They sent the first telegram across this wire and it took 18 hours to arrive which was like light speed back then.

the cable broke three weeks later. but even still, it was a huge success. A revolution for a world whose progress hinged on being more and more connected. that's insane which lies on the ocean.

today. the planet would be linked up by many more of these cables draped along the ocean floor though people across the world and eventually allowing us to access information through webpages. I've always kept the ads I always make sure that you you'll see the code and the ad and the ad itself and I skip it. Okay, it never changed.

It never will change unless there's a problem and people will be sending a DM It's never been a problem, it's a problem that you were making out of nowhere because of the all the react drama. And honestly I don't give a which is hosted on servers far far away. An online Network called Internet today. There are 1.4 million kilometers worth of cables linking us all up and they transfer a ton of data like the fastest cables can transfer 224 terabytes per second and the amount of data being sent around the world doubles every two to three years.

Unsurprisingly, there's a whole industry dedicated to just laying down these cables and then monitoring them and repairing them when they break. Sometimes they get broken by fishing trawlers or anchors or natural disasters. Sometimes they even get broken by sharks, though that's pretty rare. Damn.

Sometimes these cables are broken on purpose. There's this island right off the coast of China, but it technically belongs to Taiwan the country that China that looks so vulnerable actually absorb into their own. Needless to say, there's a lot of tension here and in the last five years, the cables of this little island have accidentally been broken 27 times, which is a lot for cables. China Denies that they had any part in these 27 accidents.

They say it's just an unfortunate fishing or anchor incident, but I'm suspicious a fish Matsu is red. Sometimes it's unclear who attacks these cables. like a few years ago when somebody ripped out a two and a half mile piece of this cable that connects Norway to the island of Svalbard. Other times, it's very clear who's cutting the cables like when the United States was at war with Saddam Hussein in the 90s and they cut Saddam's cable so that he couldn't communicate.

Communication cables of your enemy is an old strategy they were doing that way back in like the American Civil War but they're destroying pretty much approached to me isn't just sabotage. there's another way that you can use cables to your advantage if you are a great power trying to control things. If you have access to submarine cables which governments and militaries do, you can scrape through the insulation of this cable. You can splice in another cable and you can duplicate the signal and hear everything your enemy is saying.

The British Navy did this to a German submarine cable out here in the middle of the Atlantic during World War One The Germans suspected that they were being listened to. That's pretty present all their communication as complex codes. but the British had very smart code Breakers and they were able to decrypt all of this and discover a lot of Germany's secrets. And they discovered this the machine land that Germany had to Ally with Mexico the United States Enigma This is one reason why the U.S ended up joining the war and it all happened because of Submarine Cable tapping World War II took cable tapping to a whole new level.

A more connected World meant more opportunities for Vital military information to leak out. So the U.S created a new agency where they would tap in and monitor hundreds of thousands of Civilian telegrams and phone calls flowing through both the mail but also through these submarine cables. I Mean, think about it. It was a scary time.

It was global war. It was mass destruction. So Mass surveillance on your people felt necessary. National Security Even the insides of envelopes are scrutinized for hidden writing by these sensors.

This agency was shut down after World War II but the seeds of mass surveillance were now planted. Truman creates a new secret Department The National Security, Agency or NSA Their job was to secretly collect and analyze communication happening in the country. Communication that was not meant for them. Spying on communication of all kinds all in the name of National Security Yeah, don't forget about this In the Soviet Union are locked in a Cold war.

Spying becomes even more valuable, even more of a priority for these governments. and once again, underwater cables become a Target The Americans built this entire spy submarine which had a secret space set aside for Intelligence Officers and a giant computer I guess I don't know I Have no thing about this because one part of me says well, dude, unless you're plotting some insane crazy boom whatever dude like you should be chilling right? They called this space the bat cave. Of course they did a bunch of like military dudes submarine and they've got their like secret like computers like we're in the bat cave I Can totally see it. This submarine called the USS Halibut had a little mini submarine looking thing that was actually not a mini submarine but rather a pressurized chamber full of special gas that divers would just sit in there and breathe.

It was pressurized to feel like the deep ocean so that these divers could go out into the ocean and be 400 feet under the surface and their bodies were ready for the pressure. Oh, they used this to secretly navigate to underwater cables. The one we know about happened over here right off the coast of Eastern Russia The divers would leave their pressurized gas chamber. They would navigate this big clunky electric listening device onto the cable.

It's basically a giant 20-foot recorder that would tap into the cable and record everything passing through. They somehow parsed through the dozens of different signals specific phone calls between Soviet officials. but of course, yeah, whatever they're cutting the wire as they're doing it, Wouldn't the enemy see a a a lag or miscom while it's happening? That can only be. Oh, the wire got tempered with versus like the analog days so the storage on this device would fill up.

So they had to go back with their little bat cave submarine every few months to replace the tape. They did this for 10 years. Oh, this was called Ivy Bells and we talked about it a little bit in the whole Deep dive we did on submarines. but boy it's just like, never ceases to blow my mind how resource intensive this operation was.

I Mean it's massive Advantage though. Anyway, through this tapping on the Soviet cable, the Americans learned just how scared the Soviets were by the buildup of nuclear weapons. This helped them negotiate a Slowdown in the nuclear arms race and even helped lead to the end of the Cold War. According to one expert, by the early 90s, the Cold War was over the change of centuries.

the dawning of a new millennium is Wireless So vulnerable, world-changing attack into the ultra-connected internet age. This new law that I signed today will allow surveillance of all Communications used by terrorists including emails, the internet, and cell phones. This government will enforce this law with all the urgency of a Nation At War It is now my honor to sign into law the USA Patriot Act But how we're going to see if the person is a terrorist or not of 2001. in 2006, a leaked document revealed that in a non-descript building in San Francisco behind this random young door labeled 640.

well, I mean chat isn't that literally the description of fruit of the poisonous tree. Literally, it's like a oh, we're gonna look for evidence right? And if we find it Well you were that. So we get to do it. It's like okay one, A NSA had set up this harmless looking box that tapped into the fiber optic cables that traversed the Pacific Ocean into Asia.

The phone company at T had agreed to let them siphon off the traffic that was moving through their cables. This seemed kind of messed that the US was tapping a cable where all of our communication goes through, but we had no idea what was coming in 2013. Edward Snowden An NSA contractor Unleashed One of the biggest leaks in American history. This is the greatest hemorrhaging of a legitimate American Secrets in the history of the Republic and that is what we have been looking through.

I Mean, there's a lot more documents, but we sifted through and found the documents that show us that it wasn't just one cable in. San Francisco Being tapped. the NSA was targeting every single cable that touched the United States A huge amount of global traffic, email, text messages, phone calls Global Cooperation from all these telecommunication and tech companies to do this. Microsoft Yahoo Google Facebook Haltalk? Yeah, my old Skype the hell is Paltalk Who knows, but the NSA was tapping their tables YouTube Skype AOL and even Apple by 2012.

And their goal in all of this? Well, according to one of these slides, the goal was to sniff it all, know it all, collect it all, process it all, exploit it all. Partner it all. In other words, according to another leaked slide to Master the Internet, there's this one spreadsheet in all of these leaked documents that really says it is. this is a list.

a spreadsheet of some of the good. Imagine you work on that channel. You're like an operative of this and you have this system chat. It's guess it's like Batman Lucius Fox It's like a system.

Dude, it's like it's like a candy store. You can do anything you can or you want cables that the NSA had access to. Like we literally know which ones. I mean we have the data of all of these cables.

We could literally map all of these from the Southern Cross cable that connects California to us. It's kind of fun to the Apollo cable that connects New York to France to the tiny cables that connect Puerto Rico to the British Virgin Islands All In All. By 2009, the NSA had stuck a probe in hundreds of Submarine cables all around the globe. Oh, and they didn't do it alone.

The NSA partnered with the OG Masters of Cable tapping the British since the 1940s, Echq and its American equivalents have had a relationship that is unique in the world. Okay, so there's a weird loophole thing here. U.S law allows the NSA to track anyone outside of the United States, but there are restrictions when it comes to tracking American citizens. So to get around that, they turn to their British counterparts, the Gchq.

So over the course of a couple years in the early 2010s, the NSA is paying a hundred million pounds in secret money to gain access to all of this data. This data that they call a gold mine to exploit hundreds of thousands of names, over 76 000 Geo coordinates, 194 million messages collected per day. And unlike the Nsa, the British could actually spy on American targets. But the point is, they were in it to collect it all.

If information arrives in the UK from the United States, it's governed by our laws. The system works as intended. Yeah, Okay, okay, yeah, it's a lot of data, but what can you do with 600 million phone events worth of data like that's way too much for any human. and this is where it gets kind of nuts to me.

We've got this. which by the way, I Know that we're like dealing with like really like top secret documents, but like they all have like clip art and these like templatized Windows 95 looking titles. Freaking love it. This slide, this complicated, wonky wonky slide with this flowchart is the answer to what they do with all of this data.

But here's basically how it works. So the NSA gets all of this bro. All this was leaked like from from internal all the way out. is that the Snowden Guy This is like how we did that.

That is insane. Of all of our communication either from cables or from phone companies, they funnel it through the central processing facility called Pinecone. This is presumably where they're processing a lot of this data and trying to find patterns. The NSA says that their job is to find suspected terrorists or other people who want to do harm to National Security And to do this, they use computers and algorithms to make links between suspected terrorists and their immediate.

Network The people they call the people they talk to where they are. They say they only hold on to those records and they throw out everything else. We don't know if that's true, but let's just assume it is and then once it's all processed and sorted, it goes into a little searchable database called X Key Score which is a very clunky name but I Swear to did it I bet my everything I have in the world I bet it they have my somewhere, they have it. They have multiple.

They have multiple audits, multiple hey great graphic design. Once again, this is basically like they do and you know the search engine that catalogs all about metadata that has been assigned to all of this. call Message Geolocation Information Nation and makes it searchable so you could pull up a person, a suspected terrorist and you could find everything you need to know about who they talk to, where they are, what their emails say, anything you wish to extract, it's all searchable on this convenient platform. This allows them to do searches like let's look for an Arabic font Google query coming out of the tribal areas of Pakistan and boom they're LinkedIn It's all right here in X Key Score the database.

Because of the globally connected world, the NSA now has access to this person that can see what messages they're sending. They can see where they are right now assuming they have their phone. All searchable in this convenient database accessible to agencies from other countries and all over the world. The whole assumption here is that in order to find your target, the terror yes, they'll be like did.

this guy has been home every day for like eight months. Something is wrong. Dude, he hasn't moved for one inch. you need to access all of the information.

This turns metadata into a weapon of Modern Warfare. We kill people based on metadata, but that's not what we do with this metadata. It's a revelation. All of these documents.

this whole Snowden drama was a big deal for a lot of reasons. One of the things it did is it made the location of cables really important. Most of the cables were going through the United States but after this leak, countries started to look for alternative routes that bypassed the United States like this one that connects Brazil to South Africa and then goes on to Asia. So over the last decade since these leaks, the US has become less and less the epicenter of cable connection.

And you guessed it, there's another player in town who wants access to cables. China China is rapidly building out their worldwide network of cables. I Mean, and they're doing this. They're Chinese state-owned companies like Huawei and this is adding yet another front in this emerging Cold War tension.

Great powers that want to lead the global system. It turns out that controlling and spying on cables is a requirement for Global Leadership in 2023. Who knew? But unlike the US who purports to protect privacy and civil liberties, but secretly violates them, China doesn't even protect Society off of mass Surveillance and control of information like okay, they could go all in one of the what are the what are the squad gonna do? Vote for somebody else? What? The actual footage, The movement of its population through Visual recognition through cataloging every face. Every car information is power in this day and age.

and just a couple years ago the US formed a new special unit with intelligence and regulation officials. It's a group called Team Telecom and their job is oh, they have democracy of more on that. Oh my bad. Oh dude.

I Have no idea to assess any new projects, any new cables and make sure that they aren't going to threaten or weaken U.S Interests For example, there was this one cable that was supposed to connect LA to Hong Kong. It was being built by like Google and Facebook and they were like into the project. Hundreds of millions of dollars into the project and this team telecoms shut it down. Too risky.

We can't have our Fiber Optic Cables going too close to China lest they spy on us. This is making the map look really weird. You used to only have to have like one major set of cables connecting countries, but now you're starting to see duplicates. The Chinese lines and the American lines each building out their own network, not connecting to each other.

It's like the perfect symbol of the tension. That is right. So you do get it together superpowers the bifurcated world that we're moving into. China is connecting these small remote Islands laying down cables.

and these Islanders are happy to have fast internet even if it comes from China and is probably being tapped the continent of Africa the US and China are both laying down competing. The country's caught in the middle of this. Understand what's going on? Two aspiring hegemons vying for power, each involved in spying and sucking up information in their own way. But I guess it's worth it because it means faster internet.

It means connection to the world. Russia is even trying to get in on this with their aptly named Polar Express cable. And even though the old school tapping into cables in the middle, what? What is wire doing? connecting Siberia to Antarctica to Greenland or some. Even though the old school from a block of ice to some another block of snow tapping into cables in the middle of the ocean to spy on your neighbor is kind of updated.

Now, there's some evidence that Russia might be still doing this. They've got this one. yeah, the surface ship that's generally understood to be a spy vessel and it's been spotted on the surface above where we know submarine cables are near Ireland or near Syria. Some think that they're just tapping into them like the old days, maybe using one of these like mini submarines.

but even if they're not tapping into them their very presence above the cable is kind of a threat. They could cut this cable at any moment. The US who is very good at submarines, has its own spy vessels, the most secretive one being the USS Jimmy Carter and we have no idea what it's up to. It's Jack Couldn't you literally just like send like drone submarines or something like that that sends some really weird sabotage troll machine that jumps into the table and just collapse it.

Dude, you can do Security Experts For some reason somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, but a lot of people in the industry are like, no, that's like so old days, Why bother? It's so much easier to just tap into them on land, you get way more data and you don't have to go to the bottom of the ocean. Meanwhile, the private companies in charge of these cables have started to up their own defenses. They're taking all these extra precautions, including sending out these like submarine drones that just spend their time tracing along the bottom of the ocean, babysitting these cables and making sure that there's no damage or tampering going on. Oh my.

God So I Feel like I'm gonna say what? I've said a bunch on the channel lately, which is we are entering a new chapter in geopolitics. A globalized world is hyper-connected but suddenly and unexpectedly we're seeing a new set of Divisions Countries not trust, isn't that pre-watch chat guys. if I was smart okay I had a degree I would do all that okay I Get these ideas in my head. They spawn in and they're better than yours.

Yo get mauled. Get more anymore Nations Wanting to create their own separate systems, both economically militarily but also with the infrastructure of the internet. A chapter where countries now are more skeptical than ever? Especially great Powers Great powers that are building their own infrastructure so that they can communicate and control information. Not trusting the other half of the world to handle their data.

we see navies with secret ships that cost close to a billion dollars a piece and then we see everyone else caught in the middle and in the end this is a lot of. Advocates Last Vlogs Chat I Feel like as the nicer we get right and the more the more human rights we get right and the more like like oh dude, be green, don't use this, don't use that right. The more other countries don't give a ramp up the juice right? We're slowing down, they ramp up. we're gonna get dominated.

No, most of us just want fast internet connection with friends around the world and a feeling that we're safe. Thank you All right thanks I Enjoyed that today's episode. Just a little nugget here We we did this video because I think Deep dive on submarines a few months ago I don't know if anyone saw that but it was in that reporting that we came across the the spying element of all of this and I remember I asked all of you do you want me to do this Yeah, looking like a dick is it I like that. look at this video and you also like so many comments that were like yes and so we did it and that is one thing I love about YouTube and being an independent journalist on YouTube is that I get to just ask what's that chat? it's a whole movie.

Don't get the ultra for free or not. so give me a bump me I'll play with Jesse yo this is X x on the video. Anyone knows that boy I don't know, he's just so sorry anyone knows that boy I don't know, he's just so sorry.